Tuesday 26th of November 2024
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anomalies, the new normal and the deranged warming future......

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Will there be a law to repress the climate skepticism in the media ?

This is what a cross-party group of MPs is considering. They announced it on Wednesday July 19 in the prestigious setting of the Salle des fêtes of the National Assembly, during an event organized by these deputies with the association Climate Quota. The group, led by Stéphane Delautrette (Socialist Party, PS), brings together representatives of all the parties present in the Assembly, except Les Républicains (LR) and the National Rally (RN). He will begin hearings in September with the aim of tabling a bill “relating to the media treatment of environmental issues”, possibly in December.

According to a document released by Quota Climat and the Rousseau Institute, the proposal could have the following contents:

  • the strengthening of the prerogatives of the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) to guarantee appropriate treatment on these subjects,
  • the integration of environmental issues into the media's ethical charters,
  • the guarantee of a treatment of these issues, by giving Arcom the possibility of establishing temporary rules during electoral campaigns,
  • strengthening the means to combat the dissemination of false information on the ecological crisis on online platforms.

The presentation of the project, in front of an audience of nearly 200 people, took the form of a debate on the way in which the media deal with ecological issues. For Eva Morel, co-president of Quota Climat and parliamentary attaché of Sandrine Le Feur (Renaissance), “there is still too much climatoscepticism in the media”. Similarly, noted Laurent Cordonier, director of the Descartes Foundation,  the scientific climate consensus is exploding on Twitter: this network is being taken over by climate skeptics, sometimes by robotic accounts”.

 

https://en.reseauinternational.net/censure-doxa-des-deputes-veulent-interdire-toute-parole-climatosceptique-dans-les-medias/

 

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El Niño has arrived — and it will likely be the hottest in human history. It may already have made its presence felt in the April-May heat wave in Asia. The current heat waves in Mexico and the U.S. bear its imprint too.

In El Niño years, warmer seas in the equatorial Pacific raise global temperatures. The upcoming El Niño years will probably breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming limit outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, bringing renewed flurries of weather-related disasters, including floods, drought and wildfires.

Less immediately visible will be its economic effects: El Niño is set to aggravate the failure of the prevailing growth-based economic model, with calamitous results for the world’s poor.

A recent paper published in the journal Science by Earth system scientists Justin Mankin and Christopher Callahan studies the growth-suppressing effects of El Niño events. These are far from trivial. The 2003 El Niño lowered the GDP of some countries, including Indonesia and Peru, by over 10 percent. The 2010 El Niño brought heat waves to much of the northern hemisphere, contributing to upward pressure on the prices of wheat and other staples, which, when supercharged by speculators, sent prices soaring — and in the wheat-importing countries of North Africa and the Middle East this was a contributing factor to the 2010-12 revolutions.

As for the current El Niño, income losses associated with it could hit $3 trillion by 2029, with growth potential in many tropical countries weakened well into the 2030s. The U.S., too, will suffer significant damage. “When we talk about an El Niño here in the United States,” said Mankin, the floods and landslides “aren’t typically insured against by most households and businesses.” In California, 98 percent of homeowners have no flood insurance, and the big insurance firms are increasingly refusing to offer home coverage to new applicants. This, in turn, makes mortgages harder to obtain, and suppresses house values.

https://truthout.org/articles/el-nino-is-about-to-accelerate-the-global-climate-crisis-its-time-for-action/

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The Queensland government is vigorously promoting coal’s social licence. Heat waves are clearly linked to global warming. The war in Ukraine is destroying the environment as well as people.

 

‘Coal royalties help pay for the Cairns hospital expansion’

‘Everyone benefits from coal royalties [and] this ensures Queenslanders are compensated fairly from the earnings mining companies make from this finite natural resource’. Or at least that’s what the Queensland Government wants Cairns residents, indeed all Queenslanders, to believe.

I spent a few days in Far North Queensland last week and happened to notice the electronic billboard in the picture below at the junction of two of the main streets in Cairns city centre. I expected the Queensland Resources Council to be responsible but no, the advertisement was the work of, you guessed it, the Palaszczuk Labor Government.

Why, you might naively ask, has the government chosen to focus on coal royalties as a source of funding for the local hospital? They might just as reasonably have said:

‘Your traffic infringement fine helped pay for the Cairns Hospital expansion’ or

‘The GST you paid on your home renovations and bar of chocolate helped pay for the Cairns Hospital expansion’, but no, Palaszczuk and friends want to create social licence for the coal industry.

To quote Christine Milne, ‘at the end of the day these governments are wholly owned subsidiaries of fossil fuel companies and it’s their donations and interests that matter most.’

By way of background, the coal royalty rate in Queensland is based on coal’s selling price and over the last couple of years Queensland’s budget has benefited greatly from the high price of coal. As this abates Queensland’s revenue generated from coal royalties is expected to be around $3.5 billion per year in 2023/24 and beyond. This represents 4% of the Queensland government’s total annual revenue. $3.5 billion is not to be sniffed at but it pales compared with the revenue expected over the next few years from the GST ($18-20 billion per year) and taxation ($22-25 billion per year).

Queensland has the largest number of operational coal mines and produces more coal than any other state. It also has two-thirds of Australia’s new major coal projects. During 2022/23, the Queensland government budgeted $532 million to support fossil fuel industries in tax-based concessions and direct payments to coal mines, power stations, ports, rail infrastructure and related industrial precincts. Thankfully, this is considerably less than the $730 million it provided two years earlier, probably because of the declining use of fossil fuels to generate electricity in the state.

Across Australia, total financial assistance to the producers and major users of fossil fuel from all governments was $11.1 billion in 2022/23. The Federal government funded 88% of this, mainly through the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme.

I wonder what it costs to produce and display an advertisement such as the one above. Perhaps I could start raising money for an alternative one:

‘The mining and burning of coal in Queensland is causing many of you to get seriously ill and die prematurely. The Queensland government has used public money to increase the services at Cairns Hospital so you can get treatment when our coal makes you sick.’

Is global warming making heat waves worse?

It’s getting hotter all around the globe. The evidence is incontrovertible – there can be no doubt about it.

Extremely high temperatures, heat waves, are getting more frequent, more severe and lasting longer and are occurring in regions where they have not previously been seen. Again, the evidence is incontrovertible.

But heat waves are not new – they have been documented from time to time wherever meteorological records exist. So, is global warming causing the changes observed with heat waves? To put it in the language of the scientists: can the more severe, more frequent heat waves be attributed to global warming? And if so, to what extent?

Data from the current, no longer rare, heatwaves in the USA, Europe and China shows that these events would have been extremely rare without human-induced climate change. Without climate change, the current heatwave in China would have occurred about once in 250 years rather than the current once in 5 years, while in Southern Europe and SW USA/Mexico temperatures this high would have been virtually impossible rather than occurring once every 10-15 years. The maximum temperatures during the heatwaves would also have been 1-2.5oC lower without climate change.

The maps below demonstrate an important feature of heatwaves: where the temperature is highest is not necessarily the same as where there is the greatest difference between the current temperature and the usual temperature for this time of year (the temperature anomaly).

 

https://johnmenadue.com/environment-palaszczuk-mining-coal-is-good-for-your-health/

 

 

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olive oil shortage....

HERAKLION, Greece (Sputnik) – Cretan farmers have complained to Sputnik about a succession of heatwaves decimating vegetable and olive crops on the Greek island, putting agriculture prices on track for one of their worst performances in years.


Wave upon wave of heat have rolled across Europe this July. In Greece, Europe’s third olive oil producer, heatwaves have been pushing temperatures above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, triggering huge wildfires that have scorched large swathes of farmland, burned down olive groves and claimed at least four lives.


Crete, Greece’s holiday island, depends heavily on tourism and agriculture for income. The two industries have been competing this year for the Mediterranean island’s limited reserves of winter rain that sustain it through its year-round planting and harvest season.

Antonis Keramianakis, a vegetable farmer who owns greenhouse installations in the south of Crete, said that the extreme heat of the past two weeks had all but destroyed his entire crop of seedlings, which now need to be regrown. Other vegetable growers in the area face the same challenge, he said.


Doubling the effort will push up prices of what limited crops of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants and peppers will be available in the domestic and European markets when the time for harvest comes in fall and winter, the 42-year-old admitted.


"I will have to replant the plants that were destroyed by the heat and they will have to grow again, so the cost in the final product will be doubled, since I will have to buy the seeds again as well fertilizers, and I will have to pay the workers to work on the same plants again," he said.


Ilias Stefanakis, a melon grower who owns 10 acres of land in Akrotiri, in western Crete, told Sputnik that Greece and the rest of Europe would see far less of this water-intensive crop on the shelves this year following a dry winter and the longest heatwave in the country’s history.
Winter rain reserves were already low in April when the planting started, he said. Heat that set in earlier this month, days before the harvesting was to begin, spoiled much of the crop, while the rest had to be harvested prematurely to protect it from the heat.
"Due to the lack of rain this winter and with the unusual heat of this summer my production is down to one-fourth, and as result I won’t be able to export to Europe as much I wanted to, and the tons I was going to offer to the local market will be much less as well," he said.
The impact of extreme heat will be even more pronounced in the olive oil industry where a lack of water during the hot season may affect production for years to come, Sputnik was told.


Manolis Tsoupakis, a veteran Cretan olive oil maker who co-owns 3,000 olive trees, said younger trees needed around 4 gallons of water a day or else their productivity would drop for the harvest season starting November as well as for another two or three seasons.


As winters become drier, the island has been struggling to stay self-sustaining, and the millions of tourists who have come to Crete this summer have been driving the demand for water upwards, making life harder for local farmers, Tsoupakis confessed.


"So at the moment and for the last month we are in a race against time to manage to secure the necessary amounts of water to cover the needs of the trees during the heatwaves so as to avoid any potential damage to the production in November," he said.
The 70-year-old said he did not expect a good olive harvest this season. Olive oil prices will grow markedly across the globe, he predicted, as heatwaves continue to batter not only Greece but also the world’s four major olive producing nations — Spain, Italy, Morocco and Algeria.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230730/europe-faces-hike-in-vegetable-olive-oil-prices-as-heatwaves-decimate-greek-crop-1112253482.html

 

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slow oceanic biz....

 

By Brett Wilkins

 

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” said one researcher.

The system of Atlantic Ocean currents that drive warm water from the tropics toward Europe is at risk of collapsing in the coming decades, an analysis of 150 years of temperature data published Tuesday concluded.

“The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region,” states the study, which was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Although the analysis notes that “assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century,” the study’s authors “estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions.”

“We show that a transition of the AMOC is most likely to occur around 2025-2095,” the paper states with “95% confidence.”

University of Copenhagen professor Peter Ditlevsen, who led the study, told The Guardian: “I think we should be very worried. This would be a very, very large change. The AMOC has not been shut off for 12,000 years.”

Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate action group 350.org, tweeted that “Gulf Stream collapse used to be viewed as a far-off and remote possibility… Less so now.”

Meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus called the study’s findings “incredibly worrying.”

The Washington Post reports:

The new study adds to a growing body of evidence that this crucial ocean system is in peril. Since 2004, observations from a network of ocean buoys [have shown] the AMOC getting weaker—though the limited time frame of that data set makes it hard to establish a trend. Scientists have also analysed multiple “proxy” indicators of the current’s strength, including microscopic organisms and tiny sediments from the seafloor, to show the system is in its weakest state in more than 1,000 years.

For thousands of years, the Gulf Stream has carried warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico northward along the eastern North American seaboard and across the Atlantic to Europe. As human-caused global heating melts the Greenland ice sheet, massive quantities of fresh water are released into the North Atlantic, cooling the AMOC—which delivers the bulk of the Gulf Stream’s heat—toward a “tipping point” that could stop the current in its tracks.

According to The Guardian:

A collapse of AMOC would have disastrous consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America, and West Africa. It would increase storms and drop temperatures in Europe, and lead to a rising sea level on the eastern coast of North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, told The New York Times. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”

Other studies—including one published in March and another in 2021—have also concluded that the AMOC is at risk of collapsing this century.

Meanwhile in the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctic currents that enrich 40% of Earth’s deep oceans with oxygen and nutrients essential for marine life have slowed dangerously in recent decades and could also collapse by mid-century, an Australian study released in May showed.

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/study-warns-climate-driven-collapse-of-critical-ocean-current-system-much-closer-than-we-thought/

 

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